fictionary… 8 megapixel artist… bloody awful poet.

Colored by Neon

So, you know that feeling you get when you wake up at noon following a 24 hour day, the day… and night… and day before, and all you want for breakfast is coffee and cookies? Yeah, or as I call it,

“Nano Poblano… DAY 3!!!”

I, like most of the people reading my Bloody Awful Poetry, work for a living. I say “work for a living” like there’s any such other way. Sure, there must be poets who are trust fund babies, but I’m not meeting them. I work like my dad worked, and his dad before him. Blue collar. Dirt under nails. Underpaid, but consistently so. My work is in a warehouse, and on the road, as a deliverer of things that not even UPS or Fed Ex can. I work in the middle of the night, when most of the world is blissfully ignorant of deadlines and dispatchers looming like the nightmares the day folk share when I’m on the clock. The hours are long. It is dark, but mostly well-lit. And the dirty places most people think of as ugly are beautiful when colored by neon.

But this leads to bad habits.

You can catch me at 4:45 am, washing down tortellini and meatballs with a can of PBR, trying to crash before sunrise so that the distractions of the day don’t ruin any chance of a normal “night’s” sleep. Or you can picture my breakfast, at noon, of chocolate chip cookies and the blackest coffee, just so I can make it to the shower before life starts, too soon, all over again.

So, about that trust fund. Anybody got one of those they’re not gonna be using?

The rest of my bad habits are in my poetry. They’re well-documented, however thinly-veiled. I tell myself I’m going to remove them from the interwebz one day, but I never do. Maybe because I want them there as a reminder to myself. A scrapbook that most people reserve for Facebook or Instagram. I blog my bad habits, in the form of poetry and prose, for often-too-curious minds to see. It’s my scrapbook, left open on the living room table of WordPress, for all to see.

Alright, you’ve been warned. This month’s posts will not be a series of fluffy bunny rabbit pictures, or how-to tutorials on nail and cuticle care. This month’s 30 consecutive posts will be about the places that I hear and see before you do. The ones in my own head, that I let out a little at a time.

Because, “…the dirty places most people think of as ugly are beautiful when colored by neon.”

Well done! I was a fellow “vampire” as we called them. Worked 3 12 hour shifts 7-7. I can remember trying to get to sleep before things got crazy at the house. Oh, and let’s not forget the exciting times working in a pediatric emergency room where every now and then a 15 year old “child” pulled out an pistol and started shooting. I don’t miss those shifts!

Charles, Most of my hospital deliveries start at the ER (usually the only open entrance to a hospital after midnight). I’ve been escorted PAST that kind of stuff by security more times than I can count. In fact, this may become a blog post all by itself this month.

William S. Burroughs was a trust fund baby (heir to a fortune made primarily by adding machines), though a prose writer rather than a poet. And while he did produce some brilliant work, he was all his life a junky, and he killed his first wife in a drunken game of William Tell.

(The point, of course, is that a trust fund would probably have afforded you more ill than good — or at least enough ill that you would feel undeserving of the good.)

Thank you for the glimpse into your life. I look forward to more as the month progresses.

Ruby, I would have burned through a trust fund long before my thirtieth birthday. And by “burned”, I mean by using myself as the flame. I like life better THIS way, even though the California Lottery sounds like a really good idea right about now 😉